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Great question, when will we decide enough is enough? I actually don't have a problem with the data structures interview exam inherently, my problem is with ho
by geebee 9y ago
Great question, when will we decide enough is enough?
I actually don't have a problem with the data structures interview exam inherently, my problem is with how it's administered.
It doesn't bother actuaries have to take exams to demonstrate an understanding of linear algebra, vector calculus, stats, numerical analysis, and so forth. Nor does it bother me that they have take these exams even if they took the material from a reputable college with a good grade. I think it's great that the actuarial field will allow people from multiple educational paths to take the test, giving them a choice about how they learned the material.
But here's the thing - software developers have to take these "interview" exams over and over, at the whiteboard, every time we look for new job. And unlike the actuarial exams, we take these tests under conditions of tremendous secrecy. We don't know if our examiners are qualified, or if their questions are vetted, or if the exam is consistently applied and graded. We don't have a clear and defined study path, aside from books like "cracking the coding interview". And we get no feedback, hell, at times we don't know if our performance was evaluated at all.
I've considered this for a while, and I've come to understand that exam-based professions and institutions, such as the medical boards, the bar, universities, have evolved a set of considerations, kind of a student bill of rights. Students must submit to the exams, but they have the right to a fair and consistently administered exam, evaluated by respected people in the profession or field, that the exam questions should not be capricious or utterly unexpected, that there is a preparation path, they get feedback on why they did not pass. What we have in tech is the stress and burden for examinees, in many ways amplified (whiteboard coding, on the spot, is among the more stressful ways to take an exam). But the student bill of rights is largely non-existent, and I think this is the deep and severe problem with tech interviews. Until this changes, to me, nothing can change meaningfully. And I don't just mean in interviews, I think this sort of thing is what is deeply rotten about tech, at the core of many of the problems (in a field where there's a lot of suspicion about bias, are secret tests under capricious conditions a good idea?)
And we're expected to come back for more of this, over and over, and to just take it.
Oh, by the way, there's a shortage of software engineers, best solved by putting tech companies in charge of the immigration system so they can decide who is and isn't allowed to come to the US based on how well they do on these interview tests/how much they're willing to put up with these interview tests.
- otasevic 9y agoI'm a co-founder of Refdash. Thanks for the thoughtful comment. I largely agree with things that you said. I think that interviews need to become significantly less stressful and more objective. One way in which we're approaching the stress of interviews is to strip away the bad outcomes and allow people to approach interviews as "there is nothing to lose". Another way is experimenting with different types of interviews such as group interviews or project based interviews. Sometimes the issue with those experiments though is that they're even harder to standardize. I think that in addition to what you said, we need to get to a measurable level of improvement. We try to measure the repeatability of our sessions in two ways: 1) when the same session is evaluated by two different interviewers, the ratings across dimensions should be equivalent and 2) (this one is harder to experiment control) when the same person does two interviews, they should be evaluated equivalently on the intersection of sets of things that were evaluated. By optimizing for these two ways of repeatability, we are hopefully going to move toward much more objective driven evaluations that capture the engineer's understanding of different areas and not just the spur of the moment.
- geebee 9y agoThanks for your response. Based on what I've seen from your site, this does look like an improvement. An interviewee can prepare properly, and take the interview once prepared, rather than doing this at arbitrary times that may be very busy, simply because an interview came up. Because the interview results can be used in multiple places, there's no need to do this repeatedly for companies that have confidence in the exam (I hope!). There are reassurances that the interviews are conducted by experienced engineers. I'd be interested in hearing more about this. There is actual feedback, which is critical. I interviewed at google, and my understanding is that there are actual, numerical scores in a database for my performance in the various interview exams, but I'm not allowed to know what they are. To me, that's a huge problem, and I'm glad to see from your example that you provide feedback.
- otasevic 9y agoYes, you get to fast-track through interviews at multiple companies. As far as the experience of the interviewers goes, we're pretty careful about it in our on-boarding process. Even more than the experience we look for open-minded engineers who are willing to question their evaluation and constantly work on improving the overall process. Re: feedback at Google. It's hard for companies to give you access to feedback because of potential legal repercussions and also because it is very hard for them to deal with back and forth that would inevitably occur. That's another big point that we emphasized early on that seemed like a crazy proposition - fully transparent interview process. That is, anything that a company would see, you see beforehand.